 HCC 788 supports Girls of the Finest, a G.I. Joe costume club. Be sure to order their 2017 calendar. Proceeds to benefit the charity, Canines for Warriors. Find them on Indiegogo.com. Hello everybody, Hood and Cobra Commander 788 here, and I'd like to start this video by thanking my cohorts in Cobra Convergence, Form BX257, and Half the Battle Timmer. Thank you guys for all your efforts in making this collaboration a success. That meant more to me than I can express. That was the best thing I've ever done on YouTube, and I felt privileged to be a part of it. So thank you both. But now, it's time to get back to the G.I. Joe side of G.I. Joe, and I want to do it in a big way, by looking at Sergeant Slaughter and the Warthog. I'm really excited about this one. Eddie's disease. Wah! Is that how you address his superior, Megat? Sorry, Sergeant! Stop saluting, you do it wrong, and it makes me sick! Sorry. How'd you get in my video? I'll ask the questions around here. I hear you do reviews of G.I. Joe toys. That's right. And you're planning to review the Sarge! Well yes, this week I'm looking at the Warthog AIFV and Sergeant Slaughter Version 3. I also hear you sometimes have negative things to say about the toys you review. Well, I have to be honest. Save it! I won't have any of that negative crap in my review. Listen close, Megat. If you think of anything negative to say about Sergeant Slaughter, I want you to Slaughterize it. Slaughterize it. Slaughterize it. Slaughterize it. Slaughterize it! Okay, okay, I'll slaughterize it. G.HCC788 presents the 1988 Warthog AIFV and Version 3 of Sergeant Slaughter. This is the Warthog AIFV and Version 3 of Sergeant Slaughter. This vehicle and figure were available in 1988 and 1989. They were discontinued for the year 1990. Before the Warthog, G.I. Joe had the APC, or Amphibious Personnel Carrier, from 1983. The APC was Amphibious, like the Warthog, and like the Warthog, it was a Personnel Carrier. The APC was a little bit larger than the Warthog, and it carried more action figures. However, it was less focused on armaments than the Warthog is. Although it was not designed specifically for that purpose, the 1984 killer whale hovercraft also had troop carrying capacity. Version 1 of Sergeant Slaughter was a male-away exclusive introduced in early 1986. It was based on the pro wrestler Robert Remus, who was known by his wrestling character name, Sergeant Slaughter. Remus took on the Sergeant Slaughter Personnel when he joined the WWF in 1980. I was never a wrestling fan. I don't really know anything about wrestling. I didn't watch a few of Sergeant Slaughter's wrestling matches to prepare for this video, and holy crap. I've seen a lot of weird stuff in my life, and pro wrestling is one of them. Ironically, Sergeant Slaughter was famous for a hold called the Cobra Clutch. Huh? What? Later in 1986, Sergeant Slaughter Version 2 was released as a vehicle driver with the Triple T tank. I liked both first versions of Sergeant Slaughter, but I didn't really like the Triple T tank. It seemed to me like that cheap throwaway vehicle when kids really just wanted a Sergeant Slaughter action figure. Sergeant Slaughter was the first real person to become a GI Joe action figure. He eventually became the face of the toy line, appearing in a lot of TV commercials. We will take a closer look at Sergeant Slaughter Version 3 later in this video, but we're going to set him aside for now so we can take a closer look at the Warthog. This is the Warthog AIFV with AIFV standing for Amphibious Infantry Fighting Vehicle. It is based on the real world vehicle, the Assault Amphibious Vehicle. It is a mostly faceful copy of that real world vehicle, but it does take some liberties. It is an excellent vehicle for Sergeant Slaughter because the AAV is used by the US Marines and Sergeant Slaughter is a Marine. Let's take a look at the parts and features of the Warthog starting here in the front and in the front we have a pair of plain plastic headlights, not too impressive. We have sticker teeth and tusks and angry eyes, and this is to give the front end of the vehicle kind of the look of a Warthog. A Warthog is a very ugly pig-like creature with tusks and a nasty disposition. We have a removable engine cover and once that engine cover is removed we can see some engine detail, some nice engine detail down in there. The engine is done in that light tan color, the same color as the entire interior of the vehicle. On the top of the vehicle we have three hatches and the forward most hatch is unique. It swings open and swings closed. Once we swing that hatch open we can look down at the interior detail. We have a seat down in there that's probably supposed to be the driver's seat. It's pretty deep down in there. We have some instrument panel detail but not a lot. You can stand Sergeant Slaughter in that seat so about half of his body sticks up out of the vehicle and this is a nice display option. It looks pretty good having Sergeant Slaughter displayed with the Warthog. You can fit Sergeant Slaughter down in that seat. It's easier if you remove his hat first and you have to draw his legs up all the way up as far as they'll go. He is a very tall figure so he doesn't fit in there too well but he can fit down in there and you can close the hatch. However, I have noticed that if he's wearing his hat the hatch doesn't really close very well. He's just too tall. When Sergeant Slaughter is fully seated in the vehicle and the hatch is closed he is very well protected in there and that is one criticism I had of the Triple T tank. So the Warthog fixes that. We have a very well protected Sergeant Slaughter and he has these viewing slots so he can drive the vehicle. We have two other hatches and these are the same. They flip up rather than slide and over on this side we have the gunner's position. Taking a look at the detail down in there we have a seat. We have a texture pattern on the floor. We have some other detail. Not a lot. It's okay. Not exceptional. Like the driver's hatch you can fit a vehicle down in there. We'll use repeater as an example. He can sit all the way down in there and the hatch can close over him. The gunner can stand to operate the gun and the blueprints call this an MK29 power operated 20mm cannon. One thing I like about this gun is I have the action figures hand on the grip and it fits just fine. It's not too thick. There's no risk of breaking the figures thumb. That gun can swivel 360 degrees and it is not based on any real world weapon as far as I know. We have one more hatch that flips open and again looking at the detail down in there this one has more detail than the others. We have some instrument panels and we even have some sticker instrument detail in there and this seat is facing inward rather than facing forward. We have some radar screens so this looks like it is probably the seat for the missile operator. I'll place a figure in there using spearhead as an example and he is going to face inward rather than facing forward. It's going to pop right down in there and the hatch will close. On both sides we have these cylinders and the blueprints call these Diversion multiple launch smoke grenades and these have a little loop up here on the top and they pull out really easily. I don't know why they come out quite that easily and so these could be frequently missing parts based on the stickers. It looks like this is the Canadian release of this vehicle. Swatterize it. Oh sorry. That's better. Top here we have the most prominent feature on the Warthog. It's missiles. They are large. They are yellow. They are very visible and this is a feature that was not on the real world AAV. The turret can rotate 360 degrees. It does not elevate. Both missiles are removable. They connect through a peg and slot. The blueprints call these MGM-59 Lance surface to surface dual thrust liquid propellant missiles and they are two stage missiles. These missiles may be based on or at least named after the MGM-52 Lance missile. It looks very different from that real world missile though. The front stage of this missile has this very prominent ring and I like the look of this. It's pretty cool. I like the look of this missile. The real world MGM-52 Lance missile had an operational range of 45 to 75 miles. So that's a fairly long range missile and that would be a very long range weapon for GI Joe. Swatterize it. I mean, of course GI Joe needs a long range weapon because they need the capability of attacking Cobra Island while simultaneously nuking North Korea. This type of missile could be used for nuclear or conventional warheads. So you could put a tactical nuke on this. On both sides we have these hinged doors that open up to the troop carrying compartment. These doors are hinged on these very long plastic tabs and opening and closing the doors does put pressure on those tabs and those are very prone to breakage. And this is a very unfortunate design choice because if one of those tabs breaks, it's part of the body of the vehicle. It's almost impossible to fix and it's not just a matter of getting a new part. You pretty much have to just replace the vehicle. You can allegedly fit six action figures in this troop carrying compartment. It has a textured floor. It has these safety bars to hold the figures in. It has a couple of foot pegs here in the back which I don't find especially useful. It's easy enough to fit figures in these side seats because these bars will move a little bit to allow you to fit the figure in there. It's much harder to fit figures in these back seats because this bar here is really in the way. You really gotta pop that out and move it in order to fit figures in there and that's not really easy to do. I usually have to use a screwdriver. Once that bar is out of the way, we can put some figures in this troop carrying compartment. Here we have six figures in the troop carrying compartment as they're supposed to fit in. This is not very easy. I don't know what kid had the patience to set these figures in here like this. For me, with all of these troop carriers, it was really just a matter of how many figures I could stuff into that space. Back here we have an antenna. It is pretty solid, doesn't pop out too easily though as with all antennas, it does tend to go missing. I like antennas on vehicles like this. For me, it tends to make the vehicle look more realistic. In the very back, we have a couple of sculpted hatches and some sculpted tools, I like those. Then we have a universal tow hook. Now, this is a pretty large vehicle so if you're gonna tow something behind this vehicle, you might wanna tow something pretty large. If you tow something like the Mountain Howitzer, it just looks too small and awkward being towed by such a massive vehicle. I think it looks much better towing the 1982 HAL Heavy Artillery Laser. The HAL is larger, it's a better size match for the Warthog and those colors match up very nicely too. We have these running boards along the sides here and this is a little different from the vehicle this is based on and there are no foot pegs. You would kind of expect there to be foot pegs on these running boards. We have fake treads. These are solid pieces of plastic. They do not work like real treads and on the underside, we have four wheels that it rolls on and really there's no detail on the underside at all. Can it float? Yes, it floats remarkably well. It even sits pretty high in the water. It doesn't sink down very much at all so it does live up to its amphibious billing. Let's take a look at version three of Sergeant Slaughter. Now, the first version of Sergeant Slaughter, the mail away Sergeant Slaughter, was based very much on his wrestling persona. It has kind of a wrestling costume look to it and he was built as a drill instructor. The second version of Sergeant Slaughter, the one that came with the triple T tank, still had that drill instructor look but he had more of a combat role. Version three of Sergeant Slaughter kind of a band is the drill instructor look and really now he's fully equipped for combat. Let's look at the serge's accessory. He came with one. He came with a removable hat. This is a campaign hat, also known as a smoky the bear hat and it is a hat that is worn by US Marine Corps drill instructors. It has his sergeant's chevrons on the front there. It is hollowed out to fit on the serge's head and I think it fits on the head fairly well. It does sometimes pop off though so if you're moving them around too much that hat will pop off and it's gonna be really easy to lose this hat so be careful about that. The removable hat is similar but not identical to the hats on the first two versions of Sergeant Slaughter. You can see that kind of poofed it up a little bit to allow more room for his head but I still think it looks pretty good. It doesn't look oversized and I think it fits pretty well. Let's take a look at the articulation on Sergeant Slaughter. He had the standard articulation for GI Joe figures in 1988. That means he could turn his head from left to right and look up and down. He could swing his arm up at the shoulder and swivel at the shoulder all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow so he could bend at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep so he could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside of the figure. That allowed him to move at the torso a little bit. He could move his legs apart about so far. He could move his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and he could bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's take a look at the sculpted design and color of Sergeant Slaughter version three starting with his head. And this face is a pretty good lightness of the real world Sergeant Slaughter with those shades and that very prominent chin. He has a little mustache and brown hair. Now the real Sergeant Slaughter had a bit of a bald patch on his head not seen on the action figure so we're kind of covering that up for the action figure. Comparing the version three head to the original Sergeant Slaughter head we can see they are very similar but they are not identical. This is a new head sculpt for version three. They did not just take the version one head sculpt and re-sculpted so they could put a hat on him. They gave him a whole new head sculpt. On his chest he has a brown vest with a red shoulder pad. A very large looks like a Bowie knife here. He's got a pocket. There's some texture pattern on the ribbing and that's very nice. Then he has this very prominent silver ammunition belt but he doesn't come with a machine gun or anything like that so I'm not really sure what that ammunition belt is supposed to be for. One thing that bothers me about this is over the vest it looks like we have part of his chest that should be painted his flesh tone but it's unpainted. It's just the same brown color as the vest and that looks like an unpainted detail to me. Slaughterize it. I mean obviously it's a brown undershirt that he's wearing there. Obviously. His arms are very muscular and bulky as Sergeant Slaughter should be and as his original figure was but they did not just reuse those old arms they gave him new arms and now he has some tan fingerless gloves and a watch on his right wrist. On his waist piece he has a green belt and he has a very large US Marine Corps belt buckle with the USMC initials and the Marine Corps emblem. Version one of Sergeant Slaughter had a small Marine Corps belt buckle. The version three belt buckle is about three times that size. He's wearing khaki trousers without a lot of detail. There are stripes down both sides and he has some tall brown boots. Yojo.com says version three of Sergeant Slaughter is made up of entirely new parts and does not reuse any parts but these legs look the same as the legs on version two of Sergeant Slaughter. The thighs and right down to the boots those look like the same details to me. Let's take a look at the third version of Sergeant Slaughter's file card and of course let's compare it with the first two versions. The first file card focused on his drill instructor role and talked a lot about how tough he is. That really was the theme of the first file card just how tough Sergeant Slaughter is. The version two file card expands on that and talks more about his toughness but throws in a little bit here about his tank because he is a vehicle driver now. The third file card has a lot of similarities to the first two but it talks a lot more about the vehicle that he drives. It has his faction as GI Joe. It has a portrait of Sergeant Slaughter here and this one is a little scuffed up. There's a detail on here that is different than the action figure. Here it shows he has a pistol on his chest. On the figure it was a knife. There are other details different from the action figure. His ammo belt goes across the other way. He has a little grenade here and it looks like he has a rag tied around his neck. It may seem odd for me to focus on these details but there was a GI Joe figure released in 1987 with these exact same details on his chest in this exact configuration and that was the 1987 tunnel rat. I don't know why the chest of tunnel rat shows up on the portrait of Sergeant Slaughter but there it is. His code name is Sergeant Slaughter. He is the drill instructor. His file name is classified top secret. Now remember we are talking about a character here. We're not talking about the real Robert Remus. Primary military specialty is infantry slash drill instructor. Secondary military specialty is Warthog AIFV driver. Place of birth is Parris Island, South Carolina and of course this is not the place of birth of the real Sergeant Slaughter. Parris Island is the location of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot where a lot of Marine recruits receive their initial training. Great is E7 Sergeant and in the Marine Corps and E7 is a Gunnery Sergeant. This paragraph says Sergeant Slaughter is the only GI Joe drill instructor with full authorization to drive the new amphibious assault machine, the Warthog AIFV. Though all GI Joe personnel are capable of driving the vehicle, only the Sarge knows how to beat on it to get the most out of it. That's why he's the head DI because he knows exactly how to break in something new. The first part of this bottom paragraph copies from the bottom paragraph of his Version 2 file card. Pretty much verbatim. I'm gonna skip over that part. I've already done a review of Version 2 of Sergeant Slaughter. So you can check that out if you wanna read this again. Beyond that, it says whenever it gets behind the wheel of the Warthog, he's like a raging bull in a china shop tearing up everything in his path. He runs it through the gauntlet, hammering at it and crushing it into the ground as if it were another wet behind the ears recruit. He's gotta be that way cause no one is going to cut you a break on the battlefield. If it's not as tough as he is, he doesn't want it. Sergeant Slaughter is so tough, the Warthog takes cover behind him. Sergeant Slaughter featured very prominently in G.I. Joe Media. He first appeared in the Cartoon TV series in Arise Serpentor Arise Part 1 and he was a focus of that miniseries. He had a prominent role in the 1987 G.I. Joe animated movie and he was one of the better parts of that movie. He appeared in the Deke animated series and was one of the few elements in that lower quality Deke series that carried over from the Sunbow series. In the G.I. Joe comic book series by Marvel Comics, he was less prominent than in the Cartoon series though he had some good moments. He first appeared in issue number 48 as a new drill instructor for the G.I. Joe team. In his debut, he took out Zartan with one punch. In issue number 51, he pursued Zartan when Zartan escaped from the pit. He didn't drive his triple T tank, instead he was on the Havoc as it faced off against the Dreadnock Thunder Machine. There was good action in that issue. Other than that, I don't know of any other significant Marvel Comics appearances for Sargeant Slaughter and there were some moments when he should have appeared such as in issue number 82 which focused on training new recruits. That would have been perfect for Sargeant Slaughter. The Warthog did appear in the comic book in issue number 92 but it is not driven by Sargeant Slaughter in that issue. It's driven by Stalker in his version two uniform. I think that's too bad. That was a missed opportunity. That would have been a great time to bring back the Sarge. Looking at the Warthog and Sargeant Slaughter overall. Slaughterize it! Now you cut that out. I don't need to slaughterize it. This is a great vehicle and figure set and I can say that honestly. The Warthog is a top tier vehicle. It's one of the best vehicles of the year although 1988 was a great year for vehicles. The Warthog was released the same year as the Rolling Thunder and the Mean Dog. So the Warthog is in a class of great vehicles. The Sargeant Slaughter figure is okay. I liked the first two versions better but it is kind of nice to have the removable hat and it's kind of nice to have Sargeant Slaughter in more of a full combat role. I was never a wrestling fan even as a kid. I don't understand wrestling. I don't get it. I know a lot of people like it but it was never my thing. So I've never had a connection to Sargeant Slaughter through his wrestling career but I had a great connection to Sargeant Slaughter through G.I. Joe. He isn't a complex character. He's straightforward, direct, uncomplicated. Normally I like characters with more dimensions but on a team as diverse as G.I. Joe you need someone like Sargeant Slaughter. I wouldn't want all G.I. Joe characters to be like Sargeant Slaughter but the team needs this guy. His personality fit his role. A drill instructor. His personality was as large as he is. So of course his role had to be expanded over time. Kids wanted more Sargeant Slaughter. Hasbro gave the kids more Sargeant Slaughter but they squeezed a little more money out of the kids by packaging Sargeant Slaughter with a vehicle. With the Warthog, unlike with the Triple-T tank it is a vehicle worthy of the man. It is big, it has a lot of great features, it floats. It would be a good vehicle all on its own. So that's it Sarge. Was that good enough? Did I slaughterize it enough for you? I don't care about you anymore. You're a man in his 40s playing with kiddie toys. I'd rather talk to Mrs. Hooded Cobra Commander 788. Sargeant Slaughter. Hey! Ooh! You're at it here. And that was my review of the Warthog and Sargeant Slaughter. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you like my video on YouTube and subscribe to my YouTube channel. That way you won't miss any videos. Make sure you like me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter. That's enough, that's enough. That's the end of the video. Roll a credit. Ha ha ha.